TikTok launches new feature to challenge Twitter — RT Games & Culture
Video sharing platform TikTok will now allow users to post 1,000 character text updates, the Chinese company announced on Monday. TikTok is the latest platform, after Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, to copy Twitter’s microblogging features.
TikTok users will be able to add sound and location tags to their text posts, and other users will be able to comment and share these posts just as they would photo or video updates.
TikTok’s announcement came less than a month after the launch of Meta Threads, a text companion to Instagram. Launched as Twitter owner Elon Musk announced that his platform would impose limits on the daily number of posts visible to non-paying users, Threads saw instant popularity, gaining more than 100 million users in its five first days of posting online. However, the number of daily users has reportedly halved since the platform’s launch.
In addition to these high-profile platforms, smaller apps like Bluesky, Mastodon and former US President Donald Trump’s Truth Social have all tried unsuccessfully to lure users away from Twitter in recent years.
Social media platforms often copy each other’s features. Instagram introduced Stories in 2017 to compete with Snapchat, a move that almost every other platform – including Twitter with its short-lived Fleets feature – would copy soon after. Instagram also introduced Reels in 2020 to compete with TikTok, while YouTube unveiled its similar Shorts feature the following year.
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